Vladlena Gromova

gromova Born in 1983. Lives in Petrozavodsk. Student at the International Slavic Institute, Design Faculty.

Gromova’s two-minute video Portrait is built on a short performance dedicated to the mechanics of forming a portrait. The action is set to accoustic noise based on the musical motifs of John Zorn. The entire screen is filled with a terrain of white fabric that has been thrown over a human face. Using mascara, eyeliner and lipstick — artistic tools of sorts used daily to produce a representation of gender — a woman’s hand draws a sketchy diagram of the human face onto the fabric. The contours form the portrait of a deformed double, an Other that lacks a self or a subject. Following the logic of the latent flaw in its appearance, the emerging figure needs to be anchored by some foreign object. And it soon appears: the same hand places an apple, an object saturated with symbolic meaning, into the figure’s mouth. Gromova has given it the role of an essence-revealing symbol. The apple is chewed, but not swallowed — its mass remains on the surface of the simulated canvas.
Maxim Krekotnev

Портрет. 2007. Видео; Portrait. 2007. Video